Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars. Miranda Emmerson

was interested in her sexually or whether he simply wanted to take her under his wing. He made a fuss of her as she was moving in, bringing her little gifts and lending her clothes hangers and coffee and a table for the side of her bed. And then one morning, when she was on the way upstairs to let him know that the hob wouldn’t light at all and there was something up with the gas, she found him standing at the threshold to his flat kissing an older man with slick grey hair and a banker’s dark striped suit. Leonard broke away when he spotted her over his lover’s shoulder and for a moment he said nothing but his eyes searched her face for clues to her reaction. Anna wasn’t quite sure what to say so they stood on the stairs for a while and stared at one another.

      ‘Good morning, Miss Treadway,’ Leonard said at last.

      ‘Good morning, Mr Fleet.’

      ‘Can I help you?’

      ‘There’s something up with the gas. The hob won’t work.’

      The grey-haired man in the stripy suit smiled briefly at her. ‘I’m sure Leonard can fix that for you.’

      Anna nodded and shot him a brief smile back. ‘I’m sure he can.’ And with that she padded quietly back down the stairs.

      The very next day Leonard asked Anna – for the first time – if she’d like tickets to one of the matinees at his theatre. He offered to show her round backstage afterwards and take her to tea at Bunjies if anyone was playing that afternoon.

      Anna was feeling sensitive to the fact that she had, as she saw it, thrown herself on the mercy of Ottmar and Leonard. She found that it was not in her nature to trust for too long. Her temperament seemed to fall into phases, like seasons of the year. She would blossom for a little while, establish friendships and socialise and then she would retreat and regroup, becoming watchful, even fearful, for months at a time. After the great leap from the anonymity of Forest Hill to her new life in Covent Garden she was experiencing a familiar feeling of fear, a sense of foreboding that such luck and apparent serendipity would be punished by a fall from grace. Every week Leonard would offer Anna a ticket for this or that performance and every week she gently but firmly refused his offers.

      One evening she was clearing up after the dinner service when Ottmar cornered her, his face clouded with signs of worry.

      ‘Sit down,’ he told her. ‘We’ll have a little talk.’

      They took seats either side of the gingham-clothed table and Ottmar played with the rim of the salt pot.

      ‘Did I do something wrong?’ Anna asked.

      ‘Leonard is my friend.’

      ‘I know.’

      Ottmar could not bring himself to look at her but his hand crept across the table as he spoke and he caught her fingers gently in his large and dark-haired grip. ‘Do you know what he is, Anna?’

      ‘What? Leonard? Oh! Yes. I … Yes.’

      Ottmar’s gaze rose gingerly until he almost met hers. ‘But you would not tell on him.’

      ‘Leonard? No. Why would I?’

      ‘He thinks you do not like him. He is trying to be your friend. He tried to give you tickets, an afternoon out. But you will not have tea with him … Now he is afraid …’

      ‘What? No! The one thing has nothing to do with … I didn’t like to ask for time off.’

      ‘He thinks it is because you do not approve.’

      ‘No. I really don’t care one way or … If anything it makes it easier to rent from someone, to live beneath someone, who I know is not …’

      Ottmar’s fingers sprang open and he withdrew his hand. He looked at the tablecloth again. ‘So you will let him take you to the theatre?’

      ‘Of course I will.’

      ‘You can have the lunch service off. Not holiday. Just off.’

      ‘Thank you. Ottmar … I didn’t mean to say—’

      But Ottmar held up a hand and, rising from the table, pronounced, ‘We are fine.’

      ***

      Anna had rather hoped that she might get to go to some Shakespeare, or even Ibsen or Chekhov, but these writers were not the kind of writers to set the West End stage alight. Rather the play that Leonard got her tickets for involved a pair of newlyweds living in the house of an overbearing father and failing to consummate their marriage.

      In the dress circle with the pensioners and the students Anna felt at first entranced – by the drama of the interior, the brightness of this strange world with its gilt and its velvet and its baroque loveliness. This was not the grimy air of Shaftesbury Avenue or the bus-jammed filth of Tottenham Court Road. This was like a miniature Versailles. A world of angel faces, ribbons and masks; opera glasses in their little cages, pill-box-hatted ice-cream girls in sharply starched black and white. It was a world seemingly unchanged in the past fifty years, a place suspended in time.

      Onstage the characters danced and sang their way through a vulgar wedding party. They embraced and argued and traded insults. They were a big, tight, dysfunctional mass of connectedness and frustration and wild, spiralling hopes. Nothing like Anna’s family. Nothing like the world she had grown up in or indeed any of the other various worlds she had become privy to in the past ten months. The Covent Garden world of dirty commerce, where everyone was a spiv or an interloper from some unloved foreign country. The insular planet of the Alabora Coffee House, which was governed by Ottmar’s wild extravagance and the unstinting need of the customers always to be fed and watered like grubby, grasping children. The world of Leonard’s theatre where the ladies all affected a better class of voice and every painted surface shone with a rose-gold light. She honestly could not tell if she loved London or she loathed it. For she could not decide for herself what London was at all.

      After the show Leonard took her to Bunjies and plied her with Cinzano and asked her if she’d ever thought about leaving the Alabora because as much as he loved Ottmar he thought that she must be rather bored waitressing when she had a good head on her shoulders. Anna allowed herself to get rather drunk and by the bottom of her second glass she had somehow agreed to give notice at the coffee house and spend a month on probation as a dresser to the leading lady who could not – to quote Leonard – ‘focus around the young male staff’.

      That evening, after the other waitresses had left for home, Anna sat down with Ottmar over coffee and cake and told him she was running away to join the theatre. Ottmar extended his large dark paws and cradled Anna’s hands between his. When she looked, a little fearfully, into his eyes they were tired and dark and wet.

      ‘Will you still come and have lunch with us sometimes, little Anna?’

      ‘I’ll be living just upstairs.’

      ‘I know. But life. It rushes by and then you think you’ll see people … You think you’ll do things and have time for this and time for that … And then there is never time. This is what I have learned, Anna, I have learned that there is never as much time as you think there is.’

      ‘I’ll come and have coffee with you every evening if you’ll promise not to be so maudlin,’ Anna joked.

      ‘Am I maudlin?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘It’s mostly tiredness.’

      ‘I know,’ she said and she reached across and briefly touched his cheek. ‘I know it is.’

       Let’s

      Tuesday, 9 November

      Leonard’s sitting room was large and white and somewhat bare for Anna’s tastes. There were two blue sofas and a tall white bookcase holding what looked like a double layer of paperback books. A record player and speakers